Technology
Normal telephone numbers (following the E.164 standard) may be of any length, and so when dialed from landline telephones, the network must apply heuristics to determine when dialing is complete — in the US, for example, dialed numbers are generally seven or ten digits long, sometimes requiring "1" to be prefixed (the trunk digit). On mobile phones, numbers are terminated with the "Send" or "Call" key and sent all at once over the network, so the network knows the end of the dialed number, and thus one can use short numbers without clashing with longer numbers.
For instance, on a land-line phone, one could not use the short code 12345, since then one could not dial the phone number 1-234-555-4626 (or any other number that shared the prefix 12345), but on a mobile phone there is no such ambiguity.
Read more about this topic: Short Code
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
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